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This month, the American ritual of preseason football practice gets underway for more than a million boys, from teenagers down to as young as 5. If the past is prologue, one or more of these boys will drop dead somewhere before making a single block or tackle — just from their coaches’ over-the-top drills to get them into playing condition and, even more important, to make them “tougher” specimens of masculinity.
In one of the shames of national life, a colliding game meant for self-selected gladiators somehow became a platform for young male aspiration. The output can be deadly.
At any given time, a fatal, purportedly “nonfootball-related” case of asthma may strike — such as in the case of Northwestern University football player Rashidi Wheeler, who died after collapsing during conditioning drills in 2001. Or maybe it will be exertional heatstroke, one of the top killers of young football players, which claimed the life of Jordan McNair at the University of Maryland in 2018. Or, for some unfortunate and ill-informed African American youth, it will be an exertional attack associated with the sickle cell trait, as was the case for Ted Agu at the University of California at Berkeley in 2014, though the university tried to cover up his death from a strenuous team workout as a random cardiac episode.
Since record-keeping is poor and our autopsy system is flawed, we don’t have reliable numbers, but well over 1,000 kids have probably died in the history of high school football, from traumatic collision injuries and other causes. Preposterously, Dr. Julian Bailes, the chairman of the medical advisory board for Pop Warner Football, has claimed no reported deaths attributable to youth football programs in the 40 years before 2013. In fact, there were around 30. These included the odd cases of commotio cordis, or cardiac arrest from a blow to the portion of the chest covering the heart, which nearly killed Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin earlier this year.
What happened to Hamlin was an opportunity for the football world to take stock of the sport’s harm in all its varieties. But predictably, the industry flipped the script in a matter of news cycles, from sober reflection and perspective to feel-good inspiration, as Hamlin thankfully recovered and now is poised to return to play.
[ Editorial: Delay in NFL postponement of a traumatic football game was unconscionable ]
The public simply has no idea how far the public health carnage in football extends beyond the fashionable awareness of traumatic brain injury, which alone is scary enough. Let us count the ways of neurological, orthopedic and internal organ damage — even before we get to death itself.
Have you seen a longitudinal study lately on the quality of life, as well as the life expectancy, of obese former run-stuffing defensive tackles? And how about the millions of American men who never blossomed into Super Bowl-winning quarterback Patrick Mahomes, yet banged away at the sport from the pee-wees through secondary school, contributing to the metrics of declines of workplace productivity and increases in domestic violence and opioid abuse?
No precinct of football fanaticism is more poignant than the minority African American community, with its astoundingly disproportionate representation in the NCAA Division I and NFL player ranks. Football doesn’t love African Americans back, though: 1 in 12 Black people carry the sickle cell trait, making them uniquely susceptible to sudden death or permanent muscle damage when extreme exertion turns sour.
Chicago Tribune Opinion
This is in keeping with the general attitude of giving the spectacle of football, which does serve up helpings of thrilling entertainment and elite athleticism, a pass and a shrug. What remains unexamined is the sport’s enjoyment of a blank check of subsidies from our insurance and health care systems. Most dramatically, it gets a free ride through a professionalized private farm system that masquerades as physical education on our public fields and in our public schools.
Yes, football is America’s most popular spectator sport. So, at one time, was boxing — and we no longer have high school boxing teams. At the time of the 1964 surgeon general’s report on the health deficits of tobacco, nearly half the country’s adults smoked; today that figure is closer to one-eighth.
It’s true that you can’t ban something many millions love to play and watch. You can, however, choose to put saner boundaries around who plays it and where, to replace public relations-driven guardrails in promotion of an existentially impossible goal of fundamental safety. Football mythology cites the rules tweaks President Theodore Roosevelt inspired in 1905, at a time when safety concerns first had the sport on the ropes. The truth is that Roosevelt’s expert panel was nothing more than a dog and pony show — the first of many historical cycles of hand-wringing followed by enabling.
In the end, the quest to make football safer just leads to windfalls for the manufacturers of “better mousetrap” helmets and protective equipment, and for other cottage industries of the concussion-industrial complex. No one bothers to pencil out the public cost or to weigh bottomless, tail-chasing safety measures against other priorities.
In a better world, parents who want their sons to pursue this particular extracurricular activity would be required to do so in private clubs — not on the backs of our K-12 school systems, community colleges and state universities. In this way, we would at least downsize a blood sport destined for an unflattering “bread and circuses” historical treatment.
Irvin Muchnick is a journalist and the author of the upcoming book “Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Football Conditioning,” which is being released Oct. 3.
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